Design of a fibre-to-chip coupling device with diffractive optical elements (DOE)

A system consisting of cascaded diffractive optical elements (DOE) for the coupling between two fibres and a two-channel waveguide was designed, in order to study the feasibility of DOE for such applications. Based on this system design a functional model is manufactured and tested. The authors describe the first study phase, namely the system and DOE design, that was performed by raytracing. The DOE design takes into account the technological constraints of the selected DOE manufacture technology, consisting of multilevel microstructures (binary optics) etched in fused silica